Beauty Pageants and Neocons

Sunday night Rima Fakih, a Muslim immigrant from Lebanon who now calls
Dearborn, Michigan her home, was crowned Miss USA.

Fakih’s win became a source of great pride for many in the Arab
American community. And without any commentary on the role of beauty
pageants and their
depiction of women, as a beauty queen, Ms. Fakih is now as all-American
as apple
pie and baseball.

That could be the end of this nice story, but no. Because of Ms. Fakih’s
ethnicity
or faith, it is unfortunately just the beginning.

Talking heads from the right and neocons alike are crying fowl. The same
individuals who spend endless hours defending any and all Israeli
provocations in the Middle East peace process have found time to weigh
in on beauty pageants. The reason? Arab Americans or American Muslims
must be the “other.” They cannot be allowed to be depicted as they truly
are: real people as varied as any other Americans – Muslim and
Christian, secular and religious, doctors and football players, and even
Miss USA.

So how do they respond? Easy, claim terrorism or conspiracy.
Yes, one notoriously ignorant blogger who doesn’t warrant any attention
claimed
Ms. Fakih is an “auxiliary member” of Hezbollah who has “extremist and
deadly
ties.” This would be laughable except that by yesterday a Google search
of this
young woman’s name was displaying “fakih hezbolla” as an auto-fill
generated by
the search engine.

From the marginalized absurd, we move to the more mainstream absurd when
a self-proclaimed
Middle East expert found time to analyze beauty pageant winners in
various Western
societies. In his blog post, Daniel Pipes talked of an “odd form of
affirmative
action.” Why and how an “expert” took the time to maintain data on
beauty pageants
– with photos – should sound alarm bells, but not if you already know
the narrow
agenda of Mr. Pipes and his colleagues. They cannot allow for any
positive depiction
of Arab Americans or American Muslims in their zero-sum approach to the
cultural
and political war they wage regularly. And when Mr. Pipes was challenged
by the
many reasonable people who have weighed in, his response was perhaps
more interesting
than his original post. Defending his “scholarly” work on our community,
Mr. Pipes
spoke of the judges favoring an “Arab-Muslim candidate.” He just can’t
do it.
He cannot acknowledge how quintessentially American Rima Fakih is even
while he
claims he has spent the past 41 years “studying her ‘multicultural
heritage’.”
For him and his agenda, Ms. Fakih is “Arab-Muslim.” Period.

All these attacks have prompted the Miss USA pageant to officially
comment. Spokeswoman
Lark-Marie Anton stated the following to the Daily
Beast: “I don’t believe this has anything to do with affirmative
action and
I am saddened by the ignorance surrounding her multicultural heritage.
The United
States is the land of opportunity and she is the epitome of what it
means to be
American. We are a melting pot of cultures and her family has the
entrepreneurial
spirit that defines coming as an immigrant to this country to make a
better life."

So to keep all this straight, you can go to Daniel Pipes for beauty
pageant news
and to the Miss USA competition for thoughtful commentary on America as a
nation
of immigrants. Again, laughable were it not for the seriousness of this
hateful
campaign against Arab Americans.

The narrative Pipes and the others require for their political agenda is
that Arab Americans and American Muslims are not just like us and
therefore they cannot be as mainstream as Miss USA. Ms. Fakih -- and the
Miss USA competition, in its support of her under these attacks, have
demonstrated just how absurd and ignorant the neocon's worldview is.

We congratulate Ms. Fakih on her pageant win, and we praise the
countless Americans who have been blogging their support for her in
response to these ludicrous attacks. They get it. It is simply
unfortunate for the rest of us that Daniel Pipes, Michelle Malkin, Fox
News and others don’t – and probably never will.